AI assisted migration of applications to newer SDK versions

Añadido: 2026-05-28

[00:00:02]Change.

[00:00:03]Good luck, bad luck.

[00:00:05]Who knows?

[00:00:07]Every new release of the nRF Connect SDK is full of new features, bug fixes, and improvements. It's not rare that you want to move it to it as fast as you can. Unfortunately, sometimes things may not be that straightforward.

[00:00:23]In this video, we're going to migrate an existing project to a new SDK version.

[00:00:30]We will use an exercise from Nordic Developer Academy Wi-Fi Fundamentals course, which builds and works okay with the SDK 3.2.1.

[00:00:43]As usual, before we start prompting, it's a good idea to check the Nordic MCP is up and running.

[00:00:53]Then, we will input our prompt.

[00:00:56]In this case, it's a good idea to create a separate build to test a new SDK version in a new directory to avoid conflicts with the existing one.

[00:01:06]It's good to also explicitly tell the agent the SDK version we want to test and where it is located.

[00:01:16]Finally, as this is an exploratory build, we will tell to stop if there are problems and give us a summary of them.

[00:01:24]And off we go.

[00:01:26]Even though the model will do the heavy lifting, from time to time it might need to run some local commands. Depending on your setup, those might also require manual approval.

[00:01:38]In this example, there are some build errors caused by the network socket API.

[00:01:43]We can ask to do an analysis and propose some solutions.

[00:01:51]The problem in this case seems to be related to some missing include headers, and we get three alternatives to fix it.

[00:02:00]We have our answers, but what was the question in the first place? To find it out, we must go to the GitHub repo of the Zephyr kernel and navigate through the include directories to the socket.h file. By checking its commit history, we can see a commit that removed the inclusion of POSIX headers, which makes perfect sense with the failing build we see. These changes were propagated from the upstream to the nRF Connect SDK, and with the new version of it, they hit our project. Given the size and scope of the Zephyr project, this type of problems are not that rare, unfortunately.

[00:02:30]Because this is coming from upstream Zephyr, it doesn't look like a temporal thing. So, better to ask our agent to apply the alternative three, which will turn all the socket API calls into the Zephyr native socket API calls.

[00:02:43]It may be the more drastic option now, but looks like the best in the long term.

[00:02:53]As a final step, we change the original build to use the new SDK version and toolchain, and do a build to confirm everything is working fine.

[00:03:04]Using AI-assisted development for migrating applications to new SDK releases can save you a lot of time. But of course, it is important to pay attention to some tips that will make your life easier.

[00:03:16]First, when writing your prompt, be as explicit as possible about what to do, how, and where. Do not forget the agent does not have your experience and expertise. Also, make sure the agent is instructed to use the Nordic MCP capabilities to direct it to the right resources.

[00:03:34]Try to divide and conquer your problem into smaller and simpler steps to increase the chance of success. Finally, if you have to reference local files outside of your workspace, it is always a good practice to make it with full paths. And that's a wrap. Hope you like it and be successful in your future migrations. See you in the next video.